Conan Exiles - Buildings and Structural Integrity

This guide is intended to help you with building your base with strong buildings. I will show you some things that I have picked up along the way while building my current base in the Single Player game. The same can be done in the multiplayer game if you are in a good location. There are several good videos on YouTube covering how to build your buildings in game.

Your Building Site

The building sites in the game can range from level to vertical based on your location on the map. The building system does allow you to build any where you like as long as the structual pieces will snap into place.

Just ignore the little guy and the nest. For some reason the nest will not go away and the babies are respawning in the foundations.

The area for my chosen base location has almost all of the types of terrain you can build on. The only ones not in the area of my base is where you are building under an overhang or bridge.

Leveling your Site

There actually are several ways to level your site for building on. The cheapest in materials is to use pillars and ceilings placed on top of them. Keep in mind that you will need to use more pillars closer together at the base the higher your building is. I will explain this latter here in this post.

I chose to use the most costly method by using foundations to level the site. From the water level to a flat area on the chosen site for my new building is three foundations deep. In the screen above, I was replacing T3 with T2 foundations to give the new building a unique floor color compared to the rest of my base.

How Strong is your Building?

I am going to show what happened as I removed an unfinished tower in my base. Due to a change in the bases layout, it was no longer needed and in the wrong place. To start, I removed some of the outer walls so you can see the inner structure at the base of the tower.

I started by removing the ramaining outer walls and door frame at the base.

When I reached this point, the weight of the upper structure started to cause the failures to occur that will bring the tower down.

It did not fully collapse until I removed the last part at the base, the stairs.

All though the tower was not finished, it was still strong enough to hold together with the lower outer walls gone.

Another example is what is shown here.

I had decided that the upper two floors of a building I had finished were no longer needed. This is what happened as I removed walls from the lower of the two floors. The roof of the building remaiind longer then the lower floor due to the fences and position of the walls of the upper floor of the building. I will explain this in the structural part of this guide.

Structural Integrity of the Building Parts

To see where your strutural integrity is at, you can use the Repair Hammer, an equipable gear item that you can craft. In this section, I will show you several screens with the Items showing 100%. Please keep in mind, the lower the Integrity Number is, the higher the chance of not being able to place your building piece.

All of these are at 100% as will be the walls on the lower floor of a building. As you go up and out, this number will go down.

Prior to doing some structural changes, the center of the roof over the pool was at 20% structural integrity. The screen below is prior to making any changes to support the roof over the pool.

After the changes were made, the center was at 40%. Even at 20% your structure is still a strong building and can take some damage before it fails.

Building a Large Roof Span and High Structures

This is where structural integrity comes into play. The higher a structure is or the longer the roof span is the lower your structual integrity will be.

At the highest point I was no longer able to attach foundations to the rock spire for the tower. I am sure if I built down a little at the top, I can continue to build up.

Here is how the pool looks after the changes that I made to strenghten the roof. You can see part of the rock formation the Trebuchet I show at the end is built on.

Buillding Errors

These are some errors you can encounter when you have reached the limit of structural integrity.

This error can happen anytime when you are not connecting to a wall or foundation. Even though the placement was at the end of the flat ceiling piece, you can get this error.

This error will occur when you can connect, but the pieces you are connecting to are not strong enough to support the piece you are connecting to them.

Structual Integrity that Caused the Errors

Here is what I saw when I checked the flat ceilings I was connecting to.

This one is the one closest to the supporting slopped roof panels. It is at 35% for structural integrity.

As you can see with the one that is the furthest away, it is at 15%, a drop of 20% making the next one I place at -5% or more which causes the error.

This is what was going on with the Slopped Roof panels.

As you can see, this one is at 10% which will cause the stability error I showed you above.

This panel is right below the one that is at 10%. Notice the big differance you get when they are supported on all four sides.

Properly Supporting your Roof

To prevent getting these errors, you need to properly support your roof. Depending on the size of your structure will depend on how you support it. In my case, the gate I used as a door is dictating the size of my building.

To get past the error messages, I had to place columns spaced two foundations apart on each third foundation. The colums are four high which is just short of the roof. To conect to the roof, I used one flat ceiling panel, one full wall panel, and two slopped wall panels.

As you can see from this screen, the outside roof will be impresive once I add the accent fences to the roof lines.

As you can see here, you can come off of a wall with four flat ceiling pieces. With slopped, the limit is three before addtional support is needed.

This screen shows the last parts of the roof that need to be placed once the tops for the last two columns are placed.

Building Down and Foundations

Building down is a way to get an alignment that you want with the parts of your building. Please keep in mind that some building parts will not match up due to how they are made. There are also some parts that will allow you to place them through other parts of your structure. I have not tried placing them like this, but have seen it done in YouTube videos.

Building down is where you start at the top and work down. The following screens all have had this done with parts of what is shown.

Foundations

These two screens show the front and back of the same tower. Since the primary foundation is the rock formation buried inside it, building down allowed for the allignmnet of the top with the bottom of the support tower for the Trebuchet that sits at the top. The platform is 5X5 foundations in size for the Trebuchet. To allow for other buildings near a Trebuchet, you need to increase the area to a 9X9 foundation size. You can use ceiling tiles with pillars and walls to support this in a round tower.

It is important to note that on the front view of the tower, the outer foundations do not connect to the rock formation and had to be built up from the ground. I am not sure why, but they would not connect to the foundations already placed that are connected to the rock formation.

As you can see in the screens, I have attached Fences to the lower half of the Foundations. I liked the porcupine look it gives to my base.

When I Built down here, I was able to get the foundations to meet up in a skewed fashion with those already in place at the bottom of the rock formation.

Fence Foundations

These foundations are very useful for all of us. They can be placded almost any where you have other foundations or ground. One thing I did notice with them, they will only connect to the same tier of foundation when they are not on a joint between foundations. As shown with the T2 Fence Foundations, you can make it look like tile joints on the floor. Gates will also attach to the Fence Foundations which is useful to keep them from centering on the Foundations.

Walls

To do this you need to have a structurally sound roof to start with. The wall I built down is the one to the right behind the purple banner.

All of these show the same wall. Due to the area it is located in, I had to build down to get the result and additional support to the roof. Due to the gap in the lower foundations, I was unalbe to get a door or wall to snap in place without a ceiling at the top of the opening. As you can see, the walls with frames in them will snap to the foundations. Just to the right of the opening there are some stairs making this a hard spot to build in.

Trebuchets and your Structures

This Trebuchet is sitting on a rock formation buried by the foundations you see. Since it is circular, you can place this on towers or other structures as long as you provide it with proper support. By proper support, you can use walls, pillars and ceiling pieces to support it. If you do not have enough support under the seige foundation, you will be unable to place it. As for the rest of the Trebuchet, if there is not enough room for it to rotate or fire at a target, you will not be able to place it on the base. The same applies if you interact with the Siege Foundation and build the Trebuchet on site.

This is what I came back to after placing the foundation and building the Trebuchet in place. After messing around with the foundations pictured to the left and the Wheels of Pain on the right, I was able to get it to stay in place. I had not followed my own rulle of thumb and left extra room around it.

Once you have yours placed, it is a good thing to test it to make sure the shots are clearing your buildings and walls. I saw a screen of a really cool castle with one right in the middle of the roof.

In this screen, I am standing on a spotting tower behind the Trebuchet in the previous screen. There is a ledge on the cliff over the neighboring lagoon where my shots are landing with a full load in the counterweight. The Castle I saw was fairly large and it is possible their shots would hit their tower roofs they had placed at the corners of their castle.

The Finished Large Space Roof

I still have some detaill work to complete on the outside of the building and surrounding area of my base.

This is the finished view of the top of the roof. I will add fences along the lower edge of the roof when I have more time to work on that. Forty fence panels were placed along the top of the roof line on this building.

This is the interior space prior to putting in the finishing touches. The view is from just outside the gate that I used for a door to the building.

This is a look through the open door at the finished interior space. It is ment to be intimidating to those who have been summoned for an audience. All I need now is a big burly Thrall (bigger than those in the game) to place next to the Gong.